Presented by Sahar Alhassan, Kaitlyn Lynes,
Deepa Mehta, & Ilya Perepelitsa
December 14, 2015

• National Science Foundation (NSF) is a key engine that funds US-based R&D
• Our group focused on NSF grant dollars allocated to US institutions from 2002 to 2015
• We focused on the relationships between grant type (new, continuing, revised) over time
• We also examined the types of approved grant projects, as well as institutions and disciplines that received federal funding
• We also began to explore geographic concentration of grant funding

• Started with the NSF Grant Database
• Collated yearly data into a separate subsets of a dataframe
  
• Aggregated data by year using loops and packaged
• Developed a series of plots

load("NSF.RData") 
library(ggplot2) 
newdata <- schoolsall[which(schoolsall$starting_date < '2015-01-01' & schoolsall$starting_date > '2014-01-01'), ] 
newdata1 <- schoolsall[which(schoolsall$starting_date < '2015-01-01' & schoolsall$starting_date > '2013-01-01'), ] 
newdata2 <- schoolsall[which(schoolsall$starting_date < '2015-01-01' & schoolsall$starting_date > '2012-01-01'), ] 
newdata3 <- schoolsall[which(schoolsall$starting_date < '2015-01-01' & schoolsall$starting_date > '2008-01-01'), ] 
newdata4 <- schoolsall[which(schoolsall$starting_date < '2015-01-01' & schoolsall$starting_date > '1999-01-01'), ] 
newdata5 <- schoolsall[which(schoolsall$starting_date < '2015-01-01' & schoolsall$starting_date > '1999-01-01'), ] 

• One year snapshot
• Continued and New Projects Received More Grant Allocation than Revised Projects

• We decided to look at this over two years
• This showed us a trend

• We looked at this trend over 16 years
• Towards the end of every year, we see more grant dollars allocated

1. The cheaper grants appear to be allocated in the beginning of the year and more expensive ones towards the end (reflects the "difficulty")
2. Pressure to spend the Congress Appropriations results in an increased demand for grants and makes NSF choose more expensive grants

• We broke it this trend down by action type
• Revised grants saw a large gap between 2001 and 2004

• During this period, most grants were in the Engineering, Mathematics and Geosciences
• Institutions appear to receive most of the grants directly

## 10. NSF Grant Dollar Allocation by Month as a Function of Research Duration * Are projects with a longer duration allocated larger grants?

• What accounts for the gap in data in 2004?
• Is this a gap in data or was research funding halted due to a government shutdown in 2004?
  

• Finding
• Finding

• Finding
• Finding